Lucky Ride (The Lucky O'Toole Vegas Adventure Series Book 8) Page 15

  The mirrored glass at the Mirage concentrated the sunlight like an aluminum panel sizzled a sunbather before SPF.

  “You’re going to fry sitting there.”

  As expected, Mona curled in her normal place in the crook of the couch, giving her a view of the Strip angling into the distance to the left and the right and the mountains directly beyond. Her feet tucked under her and behind a fortification of bright silk pillows, Mona stared out the window. “The only light I see these days is reflected.”

  I gave her a longer than normal look. That sort of comment was a bit circumspect for Mother’s shoot-them-between-the-eyes approach. I chalked it up to a clever coincidence, but still, it put me on my guard. If she was contemplating a step into the spotlight, running for cover became a viable strategy.

  She glanced at me as I took a similar spot on the opposite end of the couch. I didn’t bother with the pillow wall—silk wouldn’t offer any protection from my mother. For that I’d need a cross, some holy water, and a silver bullet.

  “Happy birthday.” Mona stared out the window like a caged animal eyeing freedom.

  Frankly, being imprisoned with two tiny humans who did nothing other than eat, cry, sleep, and poop sounded worse than a life sentence to Devil’s Island. I tried to stifle the pangs of sympathy welling in my chest. I needed my strength, my fortified resolve. Mona could sense weakness like a shark trailing blood. Forcing her into answers she didn’t want to give, to relive a history that couldn’t be pleasant no matter how I tried to spin it would take all my skills…or a two-by-four between the eyes.

  “Thanks.” Everyone knew how much I hated my birthday, so they were well-trained to offer only the lightest good wishes and then drop it.

  Bethany’s photo burned a hole in my pocket. Yes, although I wore a new outfit—the old one had seen two continents, too much Champagne, and an adrenaline overload that made it offensive even to one with diminished sensibilities such as myself—I’d managed to remember the photo in the old one before I’d stuffed it into the box for the valet. A mental level normally not associated with pre-coffee me.

  “Do you have any coffee?” I decided to try subtle first and resort to force as a last resort.

  “I’m off stimulants.”

  I stepped on an inappropriate response.

  She gave me the side-eye. “Isn’t it a bit late for coffee?”

  “Time of day is hardly a criterion for determining appropriate beverage intake, especially in Vegas.”

  Mother had dressed for the day. Gone was her normal tattered robe and beleaguered air. In her tailored peach suit, hot pink shirt, double strands of South Sea pearls, and pantyhose, she looked almost like herself. A pair of Lou-bous tangled, abandoned under the side table.

  “Are you going to tell me about Macau?”

  Her question caught me off guard. Had I really not seen her since I’d returned from China? Of course, that had only been what? Two days ago? Two days, a murder…a lifetime.

  Sympathy softened her tone. The several bodies I’d left in my wake during my recent trip to the Far East could account for that. Or, it could be another game entirely.

  “No.”

  No wasn’t a word she was used to hearing, but this time she took it in stride.

  Happy to see her back in full feather, I nevertheless raised my shields as I adjusted my previous assessment. She didn’t have the look of a caged animal eyeing freedom. No, she was contemplating food—a predator looking for a conquest.

  Yep, the old Mona I knew and feared had donned the camouflage to throw the unwary off her scent, to lure the weak and ignorant into her web.

  “What’s with the battle dress?” I asked, feigning a note of casual indifference. “You look stunning, by the way.” And she did, another tiny cut to my flagging ego.

  She was perfect in every way that I was not. Although I was old enough to see my own skills, I wasn’t yet to the point of valuing them enough.

  And as a kid, I thought I’d know everything when I was a grown up. Well, I didn’t. And there were only two possible explanations: as a kid, I was misinformed, or I was not yet grown-up.

  I hid behind the latter—a great excuse.

  Her soft brown hair was gathered in a tail that trailed down her back—she’d been letting her hair grow. A few loose tendrils curled next to her face to soften the cliffs of her cheekbones. Her eyes, a sharp blue that seemed to shine with purpose, were large and round. Doe eyes, someone had said. Baiting the trap, especially when it came to men, someone had said years ago and it had stuck. True or not, Mona had a mesmerizing effect on the Y-chromosome set bordering on the creepy…or the pathetic.

  She pretended to pluck at an invisible speck of lint, then she gave me an aw-shucks bat of her eyelashes. A tactic wasted on me, but she was definitely honing her skills. Nothing like a starring position on the practice squad. “Dressed for battle, girding your loins and all of that, do you mind telling me where you’re going?” I tried to infuse my voice with interest rather than letting my worry run unfettered through the simple question like a computer virus in an unprotected hard drive.

  “I’m meeting with my constituency.”

  “Oh.” Yes, panic usually rendered me monosyllabic. “Constituency?” My voice carried that strangled-ferret squeak—I couldn’t help it.

  “Yes, you do know I’m campaigning for a spot on the Paradise Town Advisory Board.”

  “It’s an appointed position. Your constituency, as you call them, won’t have a say.” I don’t know why I wasted the breath. When Mona identified a mission, she was relentless—truth would never dissuade her. Heck, it wouldn’t even slow her down.

  “Lucky,” she adopted a pedantic tone that I found particularly irritating, “the people always have a say. They may have a vote, or not, but they always have a say.”

  Political pressure. Okay, she had a point. I’d give her the rope she wanted so badly. She could make a noose or a bridge, her call. Recently, I’d come to realize that I didn’t rule the world…not even my little corner of it. To be trite about it, I was a pawn in the chess game of life.

  Took a bit of pressure off.

  Maybe it was growing up. Maybe it was being too tired to care. Did it matter?

  Aware she’d lost my attention, Mona huffed. “I’ve called my people together today because we have a rabbit problem.” She gave me a nod, her face a mask of concern.

  I waited for the punch line, but none came. Some sort of odd, panic-driven emotion bubbled up inside me. “A rabbit problem?” My voice rode on a tinge of insanity—even I heard it. Words tumbled—I was helpless to stop them. “Have the rabbits finally had it with being pulled out of hats? Maybe there’s been an uptick in demand for lucky rabbit’s feet. Boy, someone wanting to lop off a limb would certainly get me hopping mad.” I raised a hand when Mona opened her mouth. “I don’t think rabbits die for the sake of pregnancy confirmation anymore, so it can’t be that.” I took a breath.

  Mona was smart enough to stay on the sideline. She eyed me with an odd detachment that spurred me on.

  “Easter! That must be it! Too many kids getting rabbits only to end up with twenty-seven of the darlings three days later. Then the rabbits end up living in poverty and procreating to pass the time, making it worse—like the Catholics in South America.”

  “Lucky!” Mona used her parental tone, snapping me out of it.

  “Over the line. I agree. But no birth control? Are the Catholics serious?” I crossed my arms and tried not to laugh as I speared her with a look. “Mother, really. Rabbits?”

  “Well, it’s actually close to what you imagined and managed to articulate so poorly. And it does sort of have to do with Easter, but only tangentially.” She didn’t seem huffy, just impassioned—and suddenly in love with four-syllable words.

  “Have you been taking those smart pills? They’re unproven and risky.” I made that up. Mona with a genius IQ was as dangerous as a narcissist with tons of money.

  First turk
eys, now rabbits.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  “Okay, I can see you need to get this off your chest. I’m listening.” And trying not to laugh, but I didn’t say that part—it would just get me a longer lecture. “So, tell me about the rabbits?”

  Mona reached across to lay a hand lightly on my arm. “Not just any rabbits, Lucky,” she almost whispered, her tone conspiratorial. “Feral rabbits.”

  I didn’t quite catch the laugh in time, and something dribbled out of my nose. I wiped at it with the back of a hand as I worked to keep a straight face. “Feral rabbits?”

  “They’re everywhere.” Mona leaned back with a self-satisfied look.

  “Really? Everywhere? Are they attacking tourists on the Strip? Are they carrying off small children? Are you sure delusions aren’t a sign of postpartum depression?” Tears leaked out of my eyes.

  Mona gave me a withering look and waited for me to compose myself.

  When I finally could pull in a lungful of air, she said, “Are you through?”

  The smile fled as I remembered why I’d come. “Oh, I’m just getting started.”

  That serious note got her attention. “Really?” She lost some of her stuffing, wilting a bit.

  “Yeah. Not a social visit. I’m sorry.” And I was…for all of us.

  “Your father?” If a thought could age someone ten years, that one dimmed her youthful glow considerably.

  “No. He’s fine, as far as I know.”

  She breathed deep, and youth was restored.

  “Is it bad, then?” She didn’t seem that worried—her man was okay; life would sort itself out.

  That feeling, that importance given to another, wasn’t something I knew, and that bothered me. Should it be something I waited for? Or was it something earned through a lifetime of fighting for the relationship? Another question for a different day—not that Mona was self-aware enough to give me the straight skinny. And not that I was self-aware enough to know what I didn’t know. “It depends on what you have to say.”

  One of her hands moved to her neck where she twisted her pearls, sliding them back and forth. “Me?” She actually sounded surprised. “I haven’t been important in quite a while.”

  She used to run a business, even lobby the state legislature for her industry—she’d been somebody in the way society decides worthiness. After marrying my father, she’d given up all of that and stayed home, having babies, keeping the home fires burning, supporting her man—a nobody under the metric that had formerly found her worthy.

  When had we become a society that valued employment and denigrated heart?

  And why did women buy into that?

  My mother was a pain in the ass, but she led with her heart, the only thing standing between her and serious bodily harm perpetrated by those of us who kept pulling her ass out of the fire. “Keep going, Mother. You’re on a roll. My news can wait. Tell me about the rabbits.” I kicked off my shoes and pulled my feet up under me, settling in. Forestalling the inevitable, I know. But for a few moments longer, I wanted life to be as I knew it to be.

  Mona understood—her worried look remained, but she brightened a bit, regaining some of her previous momentum. “Rabbits, right.” She brushed down her skirt then tugged the hem to straighten the fabric. “Well, it’s all very obvious. Kids get rabbits, like you said. They can’t take care of them, so their parents release them to the wild, thinking they’re doing the poor animals a favor. The problem, is they’re domesticated rabbits, for one.”

  “For another, left to their own devices, they breed like…”

  “Rabbits. I know.” Mona breathed the last word as she gave me a serious nod and conjured Marilyn Monroe. “I dare you, walk into any park around here with food a rabbit would like. At first, it’s cute; then it’s scary as they keep coming out of the Yucca and tall grasses. People just trying to have a simple picnic have been terrorized! One poor family, the rabbits tried to follow them into their car.”

  “And you plan on getting the city fathers, not to be gender specific—just for want of a better term—to do something about these feral rabbits?” Feral rabbits. Wasn’t that an oxymoron? Or the idea for a straight-to-video-overseas B movie? “Aren’t these the same city fathers who decided it was illegal for people to give food to the homeless on city property?”

  “Indeed.” Mona sat up a bit straighter. “I changed that, didn’t I?”

  I’d played into her hands—that one victory launched her political ambitions. “That you did. Okay, have at it on the rabbit issue. If I can help, let me know.” Ingrained, reflexive, manipulative capitulation—a survival skill in my family. Mona wasn’t the only one having a fling with four-syllable words.

  Not that any of it would fool my mother. She pulled the pillows tighter around her as her satisfied smile faded. “Now.” She steadied herself, pulling her shoulders back and leveling an almost regal, above-the-fray look. I used to wonder where the act ended and the real began, then I realized at some point, with Mona, the act was how she’d survived. “Why don’t you tell me why you came?”

  I’d charged over here full of desire to eviscerate her with my limited inklings and strong suspicions, but, now that I was here, I couldn’t do it.

  No matter what Mona had done, I knew her, and I knew her heart. And I was sure that, whatever it was, it had been the best decision she was capable of making at the time. That was all we could do—our best given the knowledge we had.

  And now, her best had come back to haunt her.

  I took a deep breath. “A young girl came to my office last night.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE elevator dinged. We both swiveled that direction, looking over the back of the couch. My father stepped into the room. Today, he seemed smaller than I remembered, somehow less, lacking his normal air of invincibility.

  A bullet to the chest could do that.

  When he caught us both looking at him, he forced a bright smile. “Well, just what a man wants to see when he comes home—his two favorite people in the world.” He stopped at the bar, pouring several fingers of amber liquid into two glasses and some juice into another. “Happy birthday.” He tossed the words over his shoulder.

  I didn’t respond—he didn’t expect me to. “Do you ever wonder about the opportunities missed, the people passed, just because of a few seconds?” I asked Mona as we watched him.

  Mona gave me a sideways glance. “Or the consequences missed by a few millimeters?”

  Even if he didn’t exude his normal force, he looked like his normal self. Salt-and-pepper hair trimmed to within a millimeter of perfection. His strong jaw tilted, a challenge to the Universe…and hopefully Death. An open-collared starched button-down in light pink, steel gray slacks creased to a razor’s edge, and Ferragamo loafers worn in the Italian style with no socks—his casual-day uniform normally reserved for the weekend.

  As he rounded the couch, Mona and I rotated, following him like plants keeping their faces to the sun.

  “Which third-world country are you two plotting to overthrow?” My father doled out the beverages. A Wild Turkey 101 breakfast for me. Two fingers of the single malt for my father as well—the age would give me a hint as to his day, but I didn’t ask whether he’d poured the fifteen or the twenty-five. Breastfeeding kept Mona on the sidelines, and she accepted her juice with a turned-up nose but she graced him with a megawatt smile.

  Mine was a little more cautious. My worst fear realized: he didn’t look better; in fact, he looked worse. Pain etched the lines of his face into troughs bracketing his mouth and radiating from the corners of his eyes. Paleness dusted the rosiness from his skin until it looked translucent where his dark beard shadowed despite a close shave. The hollows in his cheeks accentuated his cheekbones, which normally mounded under the folds of a smile.

  “You’re not following doctor’s orders,” I commented as I eyed him over the top of my glass. The first sip burned a welcome trail of courage, then exploded in my empty
stomach. What I’d give for the hamburger I gave away last night.

  “My life, my rules.”

  Mother gave a nervous laugh and patted the cloth expanse between us. “Sit here, Albert. Lucky was just starting to tell me about a visitor she had last night.”

  “Your family, Father. You have responsibilities.”

  He wouldn’t look at me. He knew. Maybe not what…or who. But he knew.

  With a sigh and a wince he tried to hide, he settled between Mother and me. One arm he snaked around his wife’s shoulders, pulling her close. But the other arm he kept curled across his stomach, abandoning his double old-fashion Steuben tumbler to his wife. She took a sip, but only one. Fortification? Did they both know?

  He patted my knee. I caught his hand and gave it a squeeze. His skin was cold. Both of them looked at me, waiting.

  I didn’t bother with a windup. “Yes, a young woman came to my office last night with quite a story.” I leaned around my father and captured Mona’s gaze with mine. “She claims to be your daughter.”

  Mona stilled, her expression frozen between disbelief and denial.

  My father reached over and captured her tiny hands in his large one and squeezed—his knuckles turning white. A look passed between them, one ripe with meaning for them but lost on me.

  Mona drew in a sharp breath. “Oh.” She turned a worried look to her husband. “Albert. I told you…someday.” Then she looked at me and her face cleared. An air of acceptance settled over her. “What’s she like?”

  “What?” I tried to adjust to a question I wasn’t expecting. A denial? I was prepared to field that. But a question, not really, not this question. “She’s sixteen,” I said as if that explained everything.

  “I know how old she is.” If Mona realized she’d tipped her hand, she didn’t appear to care. “What’s she like?”

  “Like me at her age.”

  Mona drifted on the memories as a smile played with her lips.